Vintage Home and Farm

It's our second winter on the homestead and one of the biggest priorities for me was to figure out how we would stay warm without spending a lot of money.  Electricity is expensive in our area, which means our electric furnace costs a fortune to run.  Originally our 1940s-era house had an oil furnace.  An electric furnace was installed about 15 or more years ago, and while it runs great, we'd rather not turn it on much, if at all.  So here we now are, trying to figure out the best and least-expensive ways to stay warm while living in a rambling two-story 3,800 square foot house. Last winter we installed a pellet stove in our living room.  The pellet stove does a great job of heating both the formal dining room and living room.  This past summer we put in a Jotul wood stove in the Corral (our den / man-cave), which heats that room very well but doesn't do much to help warm up the rest of the house.  Meanwhile, the entire second floor of the house wh...

Autumn has crept upon us much too soon, and we're finding there aren't enough hours in the day for all the activities that need to be accomplished.  Part of the struggle is that it's gotten really busy for me at work, and so I've had to increase my hours to about 60 per week - which doesn't leave a lot of time to work around the farm.  Fortunately my husband is a stay-at-home-dad who can help out with farm chores and be there for our daughter who is home schooled. We did take a break from the chores and had some fun decorating the house for Halloween one weekend morning.  It was a challenge deciding where to place decorations around the house -- everything used to have it's spot in our former home, but here in our "new" Vintage home, we have to decide anew where to place each special Halloween memory.  The trick-or-treat bucket that both my husband and daughter have carried found a good spot in the living room on an antique piano stool that my gr...

About a month ago, we decided to sell our extra eggs.  We thought about putting up a sign at the end of the driveway, but instead my husband simply placed a post on Nextdoor, a social media site we've been reading to keep in touch with neighbors.  We were surprised at the response.  Soon all our extra eggs were gone and we ended up starting a waiting list for neighbors who wanted more. We've collected a number of egg cartons to reuse for this purpose, and one of our friends gave us a giant stack of cartons.  Today I made a fun label to begin putting on the tops of the cartons.  I thought people might enjoy knowing the names of the hens who laid their breakfast. All ten of our girls are listed on the label, along with the rooster who protects them (he deserves a little credit, too!). I love the sizes and colors of eggs we get from our hens.  Each hen's egg is a little bit different. My husband started putting the egg money into a milk jar.  ...

Can you believe we made it through a whole year at our vintage home and farm?  We arrived on Labor Day Weekend in 2017, and since then it's been project after project as we've made the house livable and inviting once again and put in a small farm.  Of course, there were many times, especially early on, when I kicked angrily at cardboard boxes (I'd kick the wall, but then that would need fixing), threw a hammer into the yard, and cried like a baby, wanting so badly to just "go home".  But we'd left our prior home.  We'd taken that leap and had to live with the consequences. Cleaning this house was a monumental chore.  After ripping out all the carpeting and linoleum, I had been scrubbing for weeks -- floors, walls, windows, doors, bathroom fixtures, appliances.  Everything was so dirty from years and years of neglect. Then one day when I was scrubbing the bathroom ceiling, my fingers grazed a light fixture and I felt an enormous jolt of electricit...

About two weeks ago I pulled all the onions out of the garden and decided to try curing and braiding them for longer-term storage in the cellar. I had heard that curing the onions would help them to store longer, as it causes the outer layers to become dry and crispy (just like the outer layers are when you buy onions at the store).  The long tops of the onions also become dry.  This helps to prevent the onions from molding while in storage. I would have to say that curing and braiding onions was much easier than I thought it would be. It was probably the easiest task that I've accomplished on the farm.  And it's so rewarding to see the onions now hanging down in my cellar. I can now go down a few steps to snip off my week's worth of onions.  You can see in the photo where I've already snipped off a few onions on the left one. Of course, the first step is to dig out the onions from the garden.  Most onions pulled out easily enough with a gentle tug. Some o...

A great way to use up zucchini is to bake a couple loaves of zucchini bread. I have stored several containers of grated zucchini in the freezer so that I can make more of this bread over the next few months.  Once baked, this zucchini bread also stores well in the freezer. The recipe originally came from Jane Brody's Good Food Book , but I've made a few alterations over the years to produce a more moist loaf. Favorite Zucchini Bread Ingredients 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour 1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour 1 cup sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons cinnamon 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 4 eggs 3/4 cup canola oil 3 cups grated zucchini 2 teaspoons vanilla 1 cup chopped walnuts Directions Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray canola oil on the entire insides of two 9x5x3 inch loaf pans. In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients until well combined.  Add walnuts. Set aside. In a separat...

In keeping with the desire to build a homestead, one of the goals this year was to put in a large enough garden that we would be able to stock our root cellar and freezer with our own home-grown produce .  The shelving that lines the walls caught my attention when we bought this old house and the dream began. It took considerable effort to clean out the cellar, including sweeping out years of cobwebs, removing boxes of junk left in there by the former owners, and scrubbing the floors and shelving.   I'm pleased with our progress in restoring this home's cellar to its intended purpose.  Jars of home canned produce are now beginning to take up storage in there. So far, I've canned green beans, beets, applesauce, a variety of different types of pickles, and zucchini relish . The apples on our old apple tree just ripened and so there will be lots more applesauce coming to the shelves soon. The beets are also still going. I've canned both plain beets and pickled be...